Information Gain: How Top Content Leaders Win at SEO
Ever stumbled upon a competing post and thought, “Damn, I wish I wrote that”? That feeling of envy mixed with respect? It usually means you learned something new. This concept is known as “information gain” in SEO. It’s what makes your content fresh—often leading to better rankings. To explore the concept in depth, check out these articles by Animalz and Clearscope. They’ve nailed the theory. This post aims to complement them by providing practical, real-world applications of information gain. I interviewed three content leaders in various industries about their best work. Here’s who I talked to: Name Role Website Niche Monthly Traffic Caroline Gilbert Director of Content Angi Home Services 6.4M Nisha Vora Founder Rainbow Plant Life Recipes 748K Sam Balter Head of Content Wistia Video Marketing 114.5K In this article, you’ll get an inside look at how these pros approach proprietary content—so you can apply it to your strategy. I’ll also share how to make information gain part of your content workflow. But first, let’s touch on how Google thinks about knowledge. Understanding Information Gain: Inside Google’s Black Box The 2020 Google patent application gave us insights into how the search giant evaluates content. The punchline? Google is building a complex understanding of how topics evolve. It uses a knowledge graph to map relationships between concepts and identify new information. The patent describes measuring “additional information that is included in the document beyond the information contained in documents that were previously viewed by the user.” What does this mean? Picture this scenario: The top five search results for “SEO best practices” all talk about the same old stuff. Keywords. Links. Etc. But then, a new article pops up discussing how AI is changing SEO. What does Google do? It runs a test to see how users engage with this…
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